I should like to see leeboards more employed in this country. I remember as a small boy coming into possession of my first boat, some old ship's dinghy. I put sails in her, but, to my disgust, not a bit would she turn to windward. I tried to fix a false keel on her, but my appliances were few, and I was unsuccessful. Now, had I known of the simple expedient of the leeboard, limited as was my carpentering skill, I should have had no trouble in making my boat tack. The pleasure of sailing was thus denied to me for several years afterwards, and all through my ignorance of the leeboard. There must be plenty of boys at the present time in similar plight, in parts of the Far West for instance, where, as I discovered the other day, the very name of leeboard is unknown. In an hour or so anyone can convert almost anything that will float into something that will sail by means of leeboards; and this is a fact well worth knowing when one finds oneself in some wild corner of the earth and wishes to extemporise a sailing-craft. I have done something of the sort on more than one occasion. Once I was living by the shores of a lake in Florida. I started at short notice for a fortnight's cruise inside the keys that line the coast of the Gulf of Mexico above Tampa. Nothing else being procurable, I borrowed one of the canoes of the country, a flat-bottomed punt with no more lines than a horse-trough. I manufactured a sail, and one leeboard which I could throw over from one side to the other according to the tack I was on; and away I went with rod and gun down the shallow passes, up winding bayous and across broad lakes; a delightful little cruise; and my strange craft, to the astonishment of the crackers, sailed like a witch. It was the very coast for a leeboard; for the channels between the keys and the mainland are often very shallow--so shallow, indeed, that when the tempestuous north wind blew and the rising waves poured into my vessel, so that she would soon have filled and settled to the bottom, I was sometimes enabled to lighten her, and so save her, by stepping overboard; and then I would walk ahead of her, painter in hand, and tow her against wind and sea until the weather moderated--a manoeuvre that can be recommended under such circumstances. [Illustration: Towing head to wind.]